Raging Boll

After a slew of terrible reviews, Uwe Boll did what any right-minded film-maker would do and challenged his detractors to a fight. Phil Hoad traces his glittering career and hears how the 'Worst Director Ever' settles scores

If you have to blame someone, blame Gus Van Sant. In 2003, when the American was traipsing down the red carpet in Cannes to receive the Palme D'Or for Elephant, German director Uwe Boll was busy being philosophical about his own high school massacre film, Heart Of America. His third movie in English, he deemed it his best work to date, but the spotlight was still Van Sant's. "He got all the festival invitations for a similar movie," rues Boll. Within months, he had turned off the way of the auteur and begin eyeing up those lucrative videogame licences. Infamy would be his.

"In the last few years, the film-making where the director gave the movie a real stamp is gone," says Boll, now widely hailed the reigning Worst Director Ever. Where he's concerned, that's not true - it's become a geek obsession to look on his works and despair. His latest, BloodRayne - an adaptation of the Blade-inspired videogame, starring former Terminatrix Kristanna Loken as half vampire, half human, 100% babe - is up for six nominations at the Razzies, the alternative Oscars celebrating the ripest cinematic turds served up in the last year.

Boll reckons BloodRayne, his third videogame adaptation, is a marked improvement, but says his online reputation killed it before it had a chance. "We had so much backlash before the movie came out - on IMDB, the movie was already rated by 800 people with 0 or 1 points, before they'd even seen it. And this really pissed me off - everything that "Boll" was doing must be bad."

It's true his first two videogames adaptations - House Of The Dead and Alone In The Dark - are, by any known critical gauge, not good. House Of The Dead, a zombie flick, is survivably trashy fun in which the teen principals are hardly distinguishable from the reanimated corpses. The true travesty is 2005's Alone In The Dark - an incoherent, derivative, certifiable 1/10 with a truly chilling performance from Tara Reid.

Boll was never going to emerge prettily from the geek melee over these sins: the internet, after all, is their domain. Virtual lynch posses were rustled up; petitions drafted. Others championed the schlock-meister, a modern-day Ed Wood, but either way, overall he was covered in a kind of glutinous postmodern irony impossible to escape. Only Boll could have a producer called Max Wanko.

Boll is totally candid about his failings: he cites his weak English at the time, Tara Reid, poorly managed rewrites and his multi-tasking as producer-director-whatever as the black marks on the "soulless" Alone In The Dark. But that he was in the position to make the film at all is proof of a tough pragmatic streak: a Berlin film school reject, he graduated from Vienna film school, raised $60,000 for his debut, German Fried Movie, then carried on increasing his budgets through clever manipulation of German finance laws, by which investing in films could be written off for tax. Working outside the system, he raised low-end Hollywood budgets and, to the incredulity of his critics, attracted names: BloodRayne features Ben Kingsley (texting his performance in), Michael Madsen (passable), Udo Kier (quite good) and Michelle Rodriguez (Tara Reid-esque) in the ranks.

There's something impressive about the fact he has identified his strengths and, somehow, prospered. "In the end, I picked it this way," he says, "If I was to sit in LA with an agent and he promoted me as a director to producers there - 'This is Boll, the genius, from Germany', and I had to look like a real arty guy, I would fail totally."

Another type of stamina was on display in Vancouver last year when, finally tiring of the constant abuse, he challenged his most vocal internet critics to box against him. Marmalising all four got the anger out of his system and it was a successful worldwide publicity stunt.

So 2007 could be make or break for Boll. The German tax breaks ended in 2005, and funding is scarcer. His movies have to rely more on their own merits, and Boll is determined to choose a different direction. He promises more original material: he's already filmed Seed, a self-penned "superdark" serial killer flick and is about to go to South Africa to film Tunnel Rats, about the Vietnam war. One of his outstanding videogame commitments, Postal, looks most fun. Boll has turned it into an National Lampoon-style, taste-exclusion-zone satire, featuring Bin Laden, Bush and, in a resplendently lederhosened cameo, he pokes fun at his rep: "My movies are financed with Nazi gold."

Far from being a blight on cinema, Boll says he is a genuine film lover and it's all he wanted to do since he was 10 years old: "It's a kind of drug addiction." His persistence in the face of heavy fire is testimony to that and, let's face it, whatever we're doing, most of us start with a load of old Boll-ocks.